Re-reading The Yage Letters during lunch hour and between putting fucking toys away.
There’s a lot of fluff, flirty, needful, pleading present, as in the ’please write back’ hyperbole exchanged between Burroughs and Ginsberg, but one section stands out substantially. The entry from July 10th, 1953 by Burroughs. It follows the unique Roosevelt inauguration section.
’Yage is space time travel’, followed by one of the most intensely descriptive passages I’ve found in any of WB’s writing. Too much to include, but it’s his experience of a composite city, with every iteration of human, animal, vegetative or mineral life consuming itself in eternal horrific majesty. Ginsberg’s later experience in 1960 teeters at the intersection of a schizoid episode, something that has taken him so far out of himself that he repeatedly questions the sanity of returning to that soul space. Will he be permanently changed for the worse? What if he gives it to a friend and, lacking the necessary ritual skill sets, can’t bring that friend back to Earth?
Harrowing but fun too.